Information enough

This review essay is a series of musings inspired by Søren Brier’s recent magnum opus titled Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough (2008). It is almost ironic how instrumental rationality in the modern epoch has separated science and mysticism into a pair of binary opposites. While acknowledging what the pure reason of modernity considered to be a supernatural action, any attempt to explain it was made in terms of natural science from the perspective of the logic of explanation and causality. ‘Naturally enough’ the term natural has been habitually taken in its reductive sense of a linear direct causeeffect connection pertaining to the paradigm of classical mechanics as if describing the whole of Nature. The ‘prompt’ conclusion arrived at by means of syllogistic reasoning was simple: either anomalous effect or anomalous cause. Brier’s volume not only problematizes this logic by bringing biosemiotics into discourse in science, but also breathes life into science per se.